


Clever North Wind

by u_ne_korn



Category: Chocolat (2000)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 06:55:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8880226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/u_ne_korn/pseuds/u_ne_korn
Summary: Whose way will the clever north wind choose for Anouk?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lotesse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/gifts).



In the village, time passed.  
Outside the village, it passed faster. Tranquility as the fixed, fierce thing that Mama had raged against was gone. But being tranquil was a way of life in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, and the upsets of the 1960’s never quite made their way to there. There was no bra burning, no flower children.   
But there were river folk, and festivals, and the day that Caroline and the Comte got married… well, it was more like a week of celebrations.  
Roux and Mama never got married, though they did get handfasted one glorious Betlane night. The three of us were out on Roux’s boat when the sun set and it sort of happened.   
Not that that meant he always stayed in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. The river would call him most summers. Sometimes I would go too, though just for a week, and he would call me “captain” and say “aye aye” when I asked to visit this place and that. Eyepatches might have been involved. While I loved those weeks, I was always ecstatic to be home again afterwards, to see my friends, and Mama.  
When I turned fourteen, Josephine asked me to work for her in Cafe Armaunde. The chocolaterie didn’t need two women running it, Josephine argued. Mostly people came and left. But in the cafe they lingered, and dishes needed to be done and tables reset, and Josephine needed some time to herself, time to relax.  
It caused a huge fight between me and Mama. Because rage as she would about “the way things should be done”, and tranquility, Mama always expected to get her own way. And all through my childhood, until Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, Mama not getting her own way meant we left. One too many windows smashed in the latest shop… we left. Not enough business? The North Wind would rush out of nowhere and grandmere would insist we left. If you ask Mama a question she doesn’t want to answer, she just doesn’t. She’ll change the subject, and the question will go unanswered.   
And in her mind, the right and proper thing for me to do was to follow in her footsteps. To her reject the North Wind was one thing, but for me to reject our heritage, the chocolaterie, was unthinkable. Not, of course, that I said that. I said I was going to work in the cafe, an entire four minute walk away, after school sometimes.   
Roux sat through the fireworks calmly. I hear all these stories about fiery Irish tempers - must have missed him entirely, because I’ve never seen him angry. “She’s afraid she’s losing you,” he told me calmly, as we sat on the stoop. “She’s afraid the North Wind will take you away.” And he shrugged in my response, that that was rich of her, and how many times had the North Wind dragged me away from my friends and homes?  
And in the end, three afternoons a week plus occasional Saturday evenings, I worked in the cafe with Josephine. It was hard work, though no harder than the chocolaterie. When I was caught up on chores, I would play cards with the older men of the town.  
Slowly, surely, the 1960’s found their way to Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. Though I think it was 1971 before Beetlemania made it to the small, quiet town in the countryside of France. By then I was eighteen.  
……..  
When I was sixteen, Roux broke his leg at the start of summer. He couldn’t take the boat out at all, for the entire summer. He could barely make it down to the dock to maintain it. And so I was stuck in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes for the entire summer. That was when I first felt the pull of the North Wind. It would strike on my way home from Josephine’s, whip my hair around my face, and try to lead me past the chocolaterie, down to the road out of town, or the boat.   
I never told Mama, but she could always see it in my face. She’d pour me hot chocolate and sing songs while she combed my hair. That was when she’d sing songs of homecoming and warmth. I knew she could hear it too, but in summer, while I might actually leave, she never discussed it.  
Then winter came, my last winter in school, and the north wind was cold and cruel, not clever. I studied hard, and worked hard, and mama sang songs of summer and far-away places and the joy of travelling, and Roux limped around the chocolaterie and his clever hands made jewellery that he sold to the next batch of river-folk to pass Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. And in those dark, cold months, we’d talk about the clever north wind, and Pantoufle.   
Luc came back from university in Paris in the spring, just in time for the Easter Festival. He’d finally become a man, in those few months he’d been away. Just those last few touches. The difference was subtle, but palpable. And as Mama, and me, Luc and Caroline, sat in the chocolaterie, eating sweets and drinking hot chocolate, discussing Paris, and travel and everything Luc had been learning, the clever north wind threw the door open and called my name.  
………  
I went to church, on and off, though Mama never did. Roux would often go at Imbolc, because that was a feast day of an Irish Saint called Brigid. Pere Henri matured well, and his sermons were of Christ’s love for humanity, explanations of why sin made the world a poorer place for the people we loved. It was tranquil. I could see why Mama couldn’t abide it. Pere Henri would try, of course. But softly, calmly, inviting us to tea and popping into our shops.   
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you,” Roux told him over a cup of hot chocolate. That answer seemed to satisfy Pere Henri, and I never understood why Mama wouldn’t answer something similar, instead of just ignoring his questions.  
So I answered his questions, and asked my own. He didn’t always have answers, and he said he’d pray about it. And told me that God delighted in my spirit and my mind, and I was always welcome and had, had I been lucky enough to catch the Beetles on the radio last week?  
…..  
The north wind grew more clever, more taunting, more appealing.  
That summer when I came home from the fortnight long boat trip with Roux, I wasn’t delighted. Mama saw it in my face, and she cried. Held my face in her hands and told me she loved me.  
I walked through the apartment and the store, reminding myself why I loved the place. Touching everything. Remembering.  
I spun the wheel and watched. In my childhood, I’d seen pirates and cooking implements. Now I only saw the road, and the clever north wind.  
……  
The boys I’d been to school with had never quite recovered from a girl who would hit them if they called her names. They’d flirt if they thought it would get them a discount at the bar, but then they’d buy chocolates at the chocolaterie for someone else.  
And while the tranquility wouldn’t have allowed a woman like me, not baptised, not enthused about housework, not legitimate, a prosperous marriage in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the calmer, more tranquil years of my adolescent allowed that I might settle down with a man.  
Lansquenet-sous-Tannes declined to provide a suitable man.  
One night, out walking with Luc in another rare visit home, I kissed him. He was soft and warm and gentle. “Life isn’t a story, Anouk,” he told me afterwards. “It’s not that neat and settled. I’m sorry.”  
It was by far the most delightful rejection I’d ever gotten, and we discussed poetry and the war on the way back home.  
……  
If I was quick, I could make it to Gibraltar before the weather got bad, even with a week long stop at the Alhambra. From there, I could get down to Africa fairly easily.   
I knew she hadn’t thrown them out, surely not. They were simply too precious. I dug furiously through Mama’s closet looking for the scarlet cloaks. The north wind danced through the room, egging me on. Aha, found them, lovingly wrapped. The smaller one was never going to fit me anymore, but the bigger…  
I didn’t ask permission. I just packed. Not too much. Mama had liked her clothes too much to make travelling easy. I left the smaller red cloak folded neatly on the bed and swept down the stairs to the winds delighted giggle.  
Roux and Mama sat in the chocolaterie, waiting for me. Mama had been crying and she clutched an envelope in her hands. Neither of them were surprised to see the cloak. “For you, darling,” she said, handing it to me. Cash, enough to keep me going for months.   
Then I started to cry, that she’d known and prepared for me, and not said a thing, and the two of them wrapped their arms around me, whispering blessings.  
And then it was time to go. Mama and Roux waited in the doorway as I left. Mama didn’t say goodbye, but shouted up into the winds. “Make sure you look after her, Pantoufle!”


End file.
